The lilies bloomed that day. Out in the courtyard, in their fantastic
green-dragoned pots, one by one the tiny, ethereal petals opened.
Dong-Yung went rapturously among them, stooping low to inhale their
faint fragrance. The square courtyard, guarded on three sides by the
wings of the house, facing the windowless blank wall on the fourth, was
mottled with sunlight. Just this side of the wall a black shadow, as
straight and opaque as the wall itself, banded the court with darkness;
but on the hither side, where the lilies bloomed and Dong-Yung moved
among them, lay glittering, yellow sunlight. The little box of a house
where the gate-keeper lived made a bulge in the uniform blackness of the
wall and its shadow. The two tall poles, with the upturned baskets, the
devil-catchers, rose like flagstaffs from both sides of the door. A huge
china griffon stood at the right of the gate. From beyond the wall came
the sounds of early morning--the click of wooden sandals on cobbled
streets and the panting cries of the coolies bringing in fresh
vegetables or carrying back to the denuded land the refuse of the city.
The gate-keeper was awake, brushing out his house with a broom of twigs.
He was quite bald, and the top of his head was as tanned and brown as
the legs of small summer children.
"Good morning, Honorable One," he called. "It is a good omen. The lilies
have opened."
An amah, blue-trousered, blue-jacketed, blue-aproned, cluttered across
the courtyard with two pails of steaming water.
"Good morning, Honorable One. The water for the great wife is hot and
heavy." She dropped her buckets, the water splashing over in runnels and
puddles at her feet, and stooped to smell the lilies. "It is an
auspicious day."
From the casement-window in the right balcony a voice called:
"Thou dunce! Here I am waiting already half the day. Quicker! quicker!"
It sounded elderly and querulous, a voice accustomed to be obeyed and to
dominate. The great wife's face appeared a moment at the casement. Her
eyes swept over the courtyard scene--over the blooming lilies, and
Dong-Yung standing among them.
"Behold the small wife, cursed of the gods!" she cried in her high,
shrill voice. "Not even a girl can she bear her master. May she eat
bitterness all her days!"
The amah shouldered the steaming buckets and splashed across the bare
boards of the ancestral hall beyond.
"The great wife is angry," murmured the gate-keeper. "Oh, Honorable One,
shall I admit the flower-girl? She has fresh orchids."
Dong-Yung nodded. The flower-girl came slowly in under the guarded
gateway. She was a country child, with brown cheeks and merry eyes. Her
shallow basket was steadied by a ribbon over one shoulder, and caught
between an arm and a swaying hip. In the flat, round basket, on green
little leaves, lay the wired perfumed orchids.
"How many? It is an auspicious day. See, the lilies have bloomed. One
for the hair and two for the buttonholes. They smell sweet as the breath
of heaven itself."
Dong-Yung smiled as the flower-girl stuck one of the fragrant, fragile,
green-striped orchids in her hair, and hung two others, caught on
delicate loops of wire, on the jade studs of her jacket, buttoned on the
right shoulder.
"Ah, you are beautiful-come-death!" said the flower-girl. "Great
happiness be thine!"
"Even a small wife can be happy at times." Dong-Yung took out a little
woven purse, and paid over two coppers apiece to the flower-girl.
At the gate the girl and the gate-keeper fell a-talking.
"Is the morning rice ready?" called a man's voice from the room behind.
Dong-Yung turned quickly. Her whole face changed. It had been smiling
and pleased before at the sight of the faint, white lily-petals and the
sunlight on her feet and the fragrance of the orchids in her hair; but
now it was lit with an inner radiance.
"My beloved Master!" Dong-Yung made a little instinctive gesture toward
the approaching man, which in a second was caught and curbed by Chinese
etiquette. Dressed, as she was, in pale-gray satin trousers, loose, and
banded at the knee with wide blue stripes, and with a soft jacket to
match, she was as beautiful in the eyes of the approaching man as the
newly opened lilies. What he was in her eyes it would be hard for any
modern woman to grasp: that rapture of adoration, that bliss of worship,
has lingered only in rare hearts and rarer spots on the earth's surface.
Foh-Kyung came out slowly through the ancestral hall. The sunlight edged
it like a bright border. The doors were wide open, and Dong-Yung saw the
decorous rows of square chairs and square tables set rhythmically along
the walls, and the covered dais at the head for the guest of honor. Long
crimson scrolls, sprawled with gold ideographs, hung from ceiling to
floor. A rosewood cabinet, filled with vases, peach bloom, imperial
yellow, and turquoise blue, gleamed like a lighted lamp in the shadowy
morning light of the room.
Foh-Kyung stooped to smell the lilies.
"They perfume the very air we breathe. Little Jewel, I love our old
Chinese ways. I love the custom of the lily-planting and the day the
lilies bloom. I love to think the gods smell them in heaven, and are
gracious to mortals for their fragrance's sake."
"I am so happy!" Dong-Yung said, poking the toe of her slipper in and
out the sunlight. She looked up at the man before her, and saw he was
tall and slim and as subtle-featured as the cross-legged bronze Buddha
himself. His long, thin hands were hid, crossed and slipped along the
wrists within the loose apricot satin sleeves of his brocaded garment.
His feet, in their black satin slippers and tight-fitting white muslin
socks, were austere and aristocratic. Dong-Yung, when he was absent,
loved best to think of him thus, with his hands hidden and his eyes
smiling.
"The willow-leaves will bud soon," answered Dong-Yung, glancing over her
shoulder at the tapering, yellowing twigs of the ancient tree.
"And the beech-blossoms," continued Foh-Kyung. "'The earth is the
Lord's, and the fullness thereof.'"
"The foreign devil's wisdom," answered Dong-Yung.
"It is greater than ours, Dong-Yung; greater and lovelier. To-day,
to-day, I will go to their hall of ceremonial worship and say to their
holy priest that I think and believe the Jesus way."
"Oh, most-beloved Master, is it also permitted to women, to a small
wife, to believe the Jesus way?"
"I will believe for thee, too, little Lotus Flower in the Pond."
"Tell me, O Teacher of Knowledge--tell me that in my heart and in my
mind I may follow a little way whither thou goest in thy heart and in
thy mind!"
Foh-Kyung moved out of the shadow of the ancestral hall and stood in the
warm sunlight beside Dong-Yung, his small wife. His hands were still
withheld and hidden, clasping his wrists within the wide, loose apricot
sleeves of his gown, but his eyes looked as if they touched her.
Dong-Yung hid her happiness even as the flowers hide theirs, within
silent, incurving petals.
"The water is cold as the chill of death. Go, bring me hot water--water
hot enough to scald an egg."
Foh-Kyung and Dong-Yung turned to the casement in the upper right-hand
wing and listened apprehensively. The quick chatter of angry voices
rushed out into the sunlight.
"The honorable great wife is very cross this morning." Dong-Yung
shivered and turned back to the lilies. "To-day perhaps she will beat me
again. Would that at least I had borne my lord a young prince for a son;
then perhaps--"
"Go not near her, little Jewel. Stay in thine own rooms. Nay, I have
sons a-plenty. Do not regret the childlessness. I would not have your
body go down one foot into the grave for a child. I love thee for
thyself."
"Now my lord speaks truly, as do the foreign devils to the shameless,
open-faced women. I like the ways of the outside kingdom well. Tell me
more of them, my Master."
Foh-Kyung moved his hands as if he would have withdrawn them from his
apricot-colored sleeves. Dong-Yung saw the withheld motion, and swayed
nearer. For a moment Dong-Yung saw the look in his eyes that engulfed
her in happiness; then it was gone, and he looked away past her, across
the opening lily-buds and the black rampart of the wall, at something
distant, yet precious. Foh-Kyung moved closer. His face changed. His
eyes held that hidden rapture that only Dong-Yung and the foreign-born
priest had seen.
"Little Jewel, wilt thou go with me to the priest of the foreign-born
faith? Come!" He withdrew his hand from his sleeve and touched Dong-Yung
on the shoulder. "Come, we will go hand in hand, thou and I, even as the
men and women of the Jesus thinking; not as Chinese, I before, and thou
six paces behind. Their God loves men and women alike."
"Is it permitted to a small wife to worship the foreign-born God?"
Dong-Yung lifted her eyes to the face of Foh-Kyung. "Teach me, O my Lord
Master! My understanding is but young and fearful--"
Foh-Kyung moved into the sunlight beside her.
"Their God loves all the world. Their God is different, little Flower,
from the painted images, full of blessings, not curses. He loves even
little girl babies that mothers would throw away. Truly his heart is
still more loving than the heart of a mother."
"And yet I am fearful--" Dong-Yung looked back into the shadows of the
guest-hall, where the ancestral tablets glowed upon the wall, and
crimson tapers stood ready before them. "Our gods I have touched and
handled."
"Nay, in the Jesus way there is no fear left." Foh-Kyung's voice dropped
lower. Its sound filled Dong-Yung with longing. "When the wind screams
in the chimneys at night, it is but the wind, not evil spirits. When
the summer breeze blows in at the open door, we need not bar it. It is
but the summer breeze from the rice-fields, uninhabited by witch-ghosts.
When we eat our morning rice, we are compelled to make no offering to
the kitchen gods in the stove corner. They cannot curse our food. Ah, in
the Jesus way there is no more fear!"
Dong-Yung drew away from her lord and master and looked at him
anxiously. He was not seeing her at all. His eyes looked beyond, across
the fragile lily-petals, through the solid black wall, at a vision he
saw in the world. Dong-Yung bent her head to sniff the familiar sweet
springtime orchid hanging from the jade stud on her shoulder.
"Your words are words of good hearing, O beloved Teacher. Nevertheless,
let me follow six paces behind. I am not worthy to touch your hand. Six
paces behind, when the sun shines in your face, my feet walk in the
shadow of your garments."
Foh-Kyung gathered his gaze back from his visions and looked at his
small wife, standing in a pool of sunshine before him. Overhead the lazy
crows flew by, winging out from their city roosts to the rice-fields for
the day's food.
"Tea-boiled eggs!" cried a vender from beyond the wall. A man stopped at
the gate, put down his shoulder-tray of food, and bargained with the
ancient, mahogany-scalped gate-keeper. Faint odors of food frying in oil
stole out from the depths of the house behind him. And Dong-Yung, very
quiet and passive in the pose of her body, gazed up at Foh-Kyung with
those strange, secretive, ardent eyes. All around him was China, its
very essence and sound and smell. Dong-Yung was a part of it all; nay,
she was even the very heart of it, swaying there in the yellow light
among the lily-petals.
"Precious Jewel! Yet it is sweeter to walk side by side, our feet
stepping out into the sunlight together, and our shadows mingling
behind. I want you beside me."
The last words rang with sudden warmth. Dong-Yung trembled and
crimsoned. It was not seemly that a man speak to a woman thus, even
though that man was a husband and the woman his wife, not even though
the words were said in an open court, where the eyes of the great wife
might spy and listen. And yet Dong-Yung thrilled to those words.